Interview with Brian Eno

From Punk, probably in
1976, by Mary Harron. From the Jeffrey Morgan Archive.

Brian Eno is sitting in Island
Records Basing Street Studios with a piece of toast in his hand.
He is working on an album: we had fifteen minutes before the session
began.

Punk: When you said Look
closely at the most embarrassing details, and amplify them, what
did you mean by that?

Eno: What I meant is that the
most embarrassing aspects of the things you do are normally the ones
that are most interesting in the long run. The places where you are
exposed, where you feel uncertainty are the places where you are
normally doing something thats quite innovative for you  or
where youve uncovered an aspect of yourself that you previously
managed to hide, perhaps.

Punk: Is that why you said youre
interested in danger?

Eno: Yeah, but any danger in
art is purely symbolic. Art is a very safe business [laughter].

Punk: No, I didnt mean 

Eno: Not like racing driving.

Punk: Yeah. No, I meant the
danger of exposing yourself to the unexpected Um. Yes: Art
is not reality, it is not truth, it is not value, it is nothing but a
construct because it is nothing but signs, and signs can only be
constructs. Why do you say its not value?

Eno: Thats actually a
quote from somebody else.

Punk: Yeah, but you printed it
in your Bio.

Eno: Thats right, its
from Morse Peckham.

Punk: Who is he?

Eno: Hes an American
professor of English Literature, who for a long time has been one of my
favourite writers, because he came up with an idea about the arts that I
consider very interesting: namely that they have a biological base and
not a purely cultural one. So that they were therefore an automatic
human activity rather than one belonging to the
Intelligentsia only. So I like that idea.

Punk: So does that link up with
music a lot?

Eno: Yeah, quite a lot, because
it immediately erodes any distinction between so-called High Art and
Popular Art, and it just demolishes any of the arguments that say that
those things exist at different levels, those things are not working in
the same area.

Punk: Because theyre part
of the same function.

Eno: Mmh. [Looking at
toast] Ill just have another little bite. [chewing]
Yes, the reason I quoted that is cause I wanted to make it clear
that my own involvement wasnt on the romantic level: assuming that
there was some tremendous reality to what I was doing. I dont
think that is what art is about. I think that its strength is that
it is dealing with unreality, which might however analogue the
way the world works. But it isnt the same as anything.

Punk: But isnt it sort of
more real than real?

Eno: No, its a lot less
[laughs] I think. Well I mean obviously when ones dealing
with words like real which are so ambiguous as to be almost
meaningless  almost any statement can be true. But what I mean to
say is that you can afford to expose yourself to uncertainties in art
that you wouldnt allow yourself in real life. You can allow
yourself to get into situations where you are completely lost,
and where you are disoriented. You dont know whats going on,
and you can actually not only allow yourself to do that, you can enjoy
it.

Its part of the stimulus of being
an artist. That has, for me, a powerful function. But its
precisely because it is an unreal activity, and its an activity
that eventually doesnt matter. In the sense that if you fuck it up
it doesnt matter at all, nobody cares. It doesnt make any
difference to anybody, and whatever artists try to believe, that is
really the measure of their importance: that their mistakes are often
more interesting than their intentions.

Its not an anti-art argument. It
says that art has a function thats quite different from that kind
of romantic rubbish that gets written so much.

Punk: You said once that music,
or any other cultural form, wasnt a straight line of development,
that the most interesting things were often the ones people didnt
notice at the time. Is there anything that youve noticed happening
now  that isnt being

Eno: I think there are a lot of
things like that. Well, the Velvet Underground was an example.
When they actually came out very very few people were interested in
them, whatever they claim now. I remember when they came out, and very
few people were interested in them at all. And for a certainty I knew
that they were going to become one of the most interesting groups, yknow,
and that there would be a time when it wouldnt bethe Beatles up
there and the all these other groups down there, it would be a question
of attempting to assess the relative values of the Beatles and the
Velvet Underground as equals. And this is just beginning to happen now.

But there are many instances in earlier
RocknRoll of groups, who, for example, had one hit of major
importance and then disappeared. The Tokens with The Lion Sleeps
Tonight was one. But there are many other examples. I think maybe
someone like Van Dyke Parks is that kind of person I think
I might be [laughter]. I think that there are certain
artists who speak to other artists more than a public, alright? So they
go through two stages. They are received by other artists and then
diffused, right? Now unfortunately there isnt a very efficient
royalty system for dealing with this situation.

Umh. For example, one of my main
activities is working with other people, right, and I regard that as
something I like doing very much indeed. Now when I work with other
people what happens is theres a  a union is
attempted between their ideas and my ideas. Normally this works out. And
so by this method, since these people often sell more records than me,
my ideas reach some kind of fruition, and kind of feed back into the
outside circle of ideas.

For example, Ive just been
working with Bowie. Which is very good because that way I shall
have reached a lot of people.

[Question missing]

Eno: Oh yeah it was really
good, I was very pleased with that. I was pleased in particular that hes
still a serious artist. He still really behaves like an artist. And that
is something I hadnt  I wasnt completely
surprised, you know, because I like his music, but its interesting
when someone whos  I think your tapes stopped.

Punk: No.

Eno: I always look at these
things cause Ive got a little tape recorder as well, umh
when someone who has made a large number of records and who can afford
to make very bad records, when he doesnt do that, and when he
really is conscientious and just involved in it the
measure of involvement for me is that sometimes he would have an idea
and jump up and down and have to rush out and get everyone to listen to
it. And that encouraged me cause I do that as well. If someones
really still surprised by himself as that I think they must be a pretty
good person

I did all the music for one of the
numbers. And thats a very good number: I think its a new
direction for him. And me.

Punk: Whats it like?

Eno: Its very slow,
melancholy piece thats rather like a kind of folk orchestra. An
Eastern European folk orchestra. Very, very melancholy. Very nice.

Punk: Can I ask you about the
music press? Because I think theyve been so used to dealing with a
particular pattern of success, and what happened in the Sixties, and
they tend to use the same standards for whats happening now. What
do you think of the music press?

Eno: Im not very
interested in them, actually.

Punk: Well what do you think is
the function of a music press?

Eno: Well it seems to be to
annoy artists. The only think I feel if I read the music papers these
days is sort of like that[making a gesture of
strangulation]. They really make me angry. Because the function should
be to look at whats going on and actually try to see the ideas
that are around at the moment. Not what the personalities are. Its
alright, you know, you could have that as a gossip column feature, as a
joke, but the personalities really arent the interesting thing.

Whats interesting is the flow of
ideas and why, for example, suddenly the idea of a four piece band
becomes viable again. Why the concept of skill starts to erode in music.
Why bands arent being formed with flash guitarists anymore but
with kids off the streets. Or why, on the other hand, on a purely
technical level, Reggae is starting to work by subtracting sound rather
than adding it, and what differences that makes to the Western tradition
of making music.

Theres a million
questions that are really very very interesting, and have  as far
as Im concerned  major sociological implications. Because
music doesnt change with whim or fashion. It changes for good
reasons. Im certain of that.

I think they may be frightened. If theyre
aware of any of these questions they might be frightened theyre
going to bore their audience. I think you can give the public much more
credit than they presently get. Theyre probably sick of being
treated like fools.

Instead of doing that, they talk about
the most insanely useless transient details of peoples
attire and personality conflicts and so on. Absolutely worthless
rubbish. I think that on a level of reporting theyre worse
than any of the bad daily newspapers in England. You know the papers
like The Sun? Well theyre strictly on that level. They
take news items to see what kind of visceral sensation can be extracted
from them. And thats why their focus is always on a particular
brand of success, as you say. Its the same way that gossip columns
in papers like The Sun always talk about what Lords and Counts
do. Not because Lords and Counts do anything particularly interesting,
but because it is considered funny by people who write this sort of
thing to point out that Lords and Counts actually behave like us. And do
stupid things and get divorced and have affairs.

Theyre dealing not only with
trivial things, but theyre dealing with trivial things badly.
You could deal with trivial things very interestingly.

If I do an interview  David Bowie
was saying the same thing  if either of us do an interview and we
throw out twenty ideas, whichever two are most banal will get the most
space in the papers.

The whole attitude of people who work
on big papers is Well, its what they want, isnt it?
Now it interests me that if they find this attitude typifying music
they condemn it absolutely out of hand. If they find groups who say Well,
were only playing what they want, they condemn that as the
worst kind of charlatanism.

Really, they should simply apply the
same standards theyre in the art business. Theyre
part of the art business. Thats the problem, they dont take
themselves seriously. They regard themselves as peripheral and of no
interest. As long as they do that theyre going to stay there.

Punk: Its misleading when
youre writing about music now to just concentrate on the artist,
because youre missing a whole other world. Youre missing the
record companies part in it, and the whole way in which people
become successful.

Eno: You realize that this is
being recorded in perfect acoustics, dont you? Youll never
get such a perfect interview recording Sory. So  [across
the room] is that plugged into the Lesley, that Wurlitzer?

Voice: Ah, sort of. I think.
Only sort of. You going to use the Wurlitzer?

Eno: Ill start on the
piano, I think.

Punk: Less sophisticated? I
mean the music business.

Eno: Yeah. Umh. I must think
Ive lost my train The truth of the matter is, it doesnt
interest me very much, the music business.

Punk: You dont have to
talk about it.

Eno: No, I just meant that
there seems to be this big block of machinery that actively  not
intentionally, but by the very nature of its construction  subdues
whats interesting. And whats interesting either is
peripheral to it or accidental.

You know, theres a vast business
involved in music, a vast business. If you not only consider the part were
involved in, but the classical music business, which is very big, and
you consider all the folk and ethnic music businesses, and then you
consider a company like Muzak which is supplying music all over the
world, there are hundreds of thousands of muillions of pounds involved
in generating music. Making it a much bigger busines than the Space
Race. And the number of interesting ideas that are generated by this
vast complex is really very small. In fact, if you analyze it on a kind
of cost-efficient basis youd find that you werent doing too
well.

Punk: As far as production of
ideas to size?

Eno: Yes. So it makes me think
that this large organism is one whose express intention, or claimed
intention, is to generate ideas, but whose mechanism is such that it cant
help subduing them. Its interest is in prolonging itself. By so doing,
since its structure militates against the future, it militates
for the present and the past. By attempting to prolong itself it
does subdue those futures. They come out, sure enough, but they have a
hard time.

I dont feel bitter, Im not
saying this in bitterness. I think its the way most other systems
work as well  the Civil Service

Punk: It sounds like politics
generally, doesnt it?

Eno: It is, the implications
are quite political.

Punk: What, the hostility to
change?

Eno: Yes. Yes. Human beings
have two orientations. One is towards the desire to participate in a
predictable world, and the other is the knowledge that the world isnt
predictable, and that it constantly changes in a novel fashion.